Citing a recent court order, the Trump administration on Saturday
resumed processing young unauthorized immigrants’ applications to
renew their protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals program.

“Until further notice, and unless otherwise provided in
this guidance, the DACA policy will be operated on the terms in
place before it was rescinded on Sept. 5, 2017,” the United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services agency announced on its
website.

USCIS said young immigrants who have previously received
DACA, and whose protections expired after the Trump
administration announced the program’s termination, may file
renewal applications.

The agency added that no new DACA applications will be
accepted from immigrants who had not previously been protected
under the program.

The Trump administration had said in
September it would phase out DACA by March 5, giving Congress
six months to enact a legislative solution that permanently
resolved the fate of young immigrants who have lived in the US
illegally since childhood.

The Trump administration also allowed DACA recipients with
near-term expiry dates to renew their two-year protections one
last time, so long as they submitted their applications before an
October 5, 2017 deadline.

As of September 2017, there were roughly 690,000 young immigrants
protected by DACA, but thousands have already begun losing their
protections in recent months. An estimated 22,000 eligible DACA
recipients either did not or could not apply for renewal before
the deadline, and roughly 1,900 of those who attempted
renewal saw their applications lost or delayed in the
mail and subsequently rejected.

But a federal judge in California on Tuesday issued apreliminary injunction
blocking the Trump administration from ending the program,
and ordering the government to resume processing DACA renewal
applications.

DACA was first implemented by the Obama administration in
2012, and offered the immigrants temporary work authorization and
protection from deportation.

The Trump administration’s termination of the programlaunched lawmakers into a
frenzy in recent weeks as the March deadline draws
near.Democrats vowed to pass a legislative fix by
the January 19 budget deadline, but negotiations devolved
recently after President Donald Trump and some Republicans
demanded certain hardliner immigration reforms in exchange for
codifying DACA protections.